Fifth set of notes from buying kits through a forwarder. The earlier ones were about grades, out-of-production kits and what volumetric weight does to a box. This one is about the thing I ignored for far too long: the aftermarket shelf.
The prices, pulled off Japanese listings on 3 September 2026
Aftermarket, all of it listed by the host kit it is cut for:
- Montex SM48016, 1/48 D3A Val canopy/wheel mask set (for the Hasegawa kit) — 630 yen
- Quickboost 48188, 1/48 J-35 Draken auxiliary air intakes (Hasegawa) — 780 yen
- Montex SM48156, 1/48 A-4E/F Skyhawk mask set (Hasegawa) — 870 yen
- E.T. Model C35-010, 1/35 Renault UE detail set (cut for Tamiya 35284) — 1,009 yen
And for scale, kits from the same session:
- Used 1/35 German mortar team, Tamiya MM No.193, listed as 中古プラモデル — 891 yen
- Tamiya 1/35 20mm Flakvierling 38 with Sd.Ah.52 trailer, 未組立 — 1,320 yen
- Tamiya 1/35 Panzer II — 1,500 yen
- Bandai old-kit Z Gundam G-Defenser, 未組立 — 2,500 yen
Why the aftermarket is the part worth adding
Everything I wrote before about volumetric weight applies to kits and only to kits. A 1/35 armour box is mostly air and you pay for the air. A mask set is a flat envelope. A resin intake is a matchbox. A photo-etch fret weighs nothing and occupies the gaps between the kit boxes you are already paying to ship.
So the economics invert. The kit is the expensive thing to move; the detail set that makes the kit worth building is, in shipping terms, free. If you are sending a box out of Japan anyway, filling the voids with masks, PE and decals is the highest-value thing you can do with that space — and Japanese domestic listings carry a lot of European aftermarket (Montex, Quickboost, E.T. Model, Eduard) at domestic retail rather than at export prices.
Reading the titles
Japanese aftermarket listings are named after the host kit, in brackets: (ハセガワ用) = for the Hasegawa kit, (タミヤ 35284用) = for Tamiya kit 35284. That convention is genuinely useful — search the manufacturer and scale rather than the aftermarket brand and you find things you did not know existed for a kit already in your stash.
The kit vocabulary that decides the price:
- 未組立 — unassembled. What you want.
- 部品未開封 — parts still sealed in their bags. Better again.
- 当時物 — period item, i.e. an original-era boxing rather than a reissue.
- 絶版 — out of production.
- 中古プラモデル — used kit. May be started, may be missing parts. Ask for photos of the sprues before you buy, not after.
- まとめ売り — bulk lot. Where the cheap kits actually live.
- ジャンク — junk: no guarantee, no returns.
One caution learned the expensive way: 中古 on a kit does not mean “shop-soiled box”. It can mean somebody clipped four parts off a sprue in 1994 and put it back. The listings that photograph every sprue are worth the extra few hundred yen.
The two hard limits, repeated because people keep hitting them
Paints, cements and anything aerosol are dangerous goods and cannot fly. Buy the kit in Japan, buy the paint locally. And the US withdrew its $800 de minimis exemption in August 2025, so a US-bound parcel is assessable regardless of value now — worth knowing before you plan a large consolidated shipment.
I wrote the Tamiya-specific side of this up properly, including the Station-limited Mini 4WD tier and the out-of-print 1/35 situation: Tamiya from Japan: Station limits, out-of-print 1/35 kits and what they cost
If you want to check current listings yourself, this is the search I use across the Japanese marketplaces. Disclosure: that is the forwarder I buy through, so treat it as a price reference rather than a recommendation — several services do the same job and the mechanics are identical.
Does anyone here systematically shop the Japanese aftermarket, or is it mostly kits? I have a feeling I am still missing whole categories of it because I search in the wrong language.